The present invention concerns electronic circuits comprising at least one second-generation current conveyor made up of a mixed translinear loop and a plurality of current mirrors. As is known in the art, such a conveyor has an input port, an output port and a high-impedance reference port.
Second-generation current conveyors are well known in the art of microelectronics, particularly for the embodiment of integrated circuits. It is known that they are generally used because of their impedance modifying qualities. Indeed, a current applied to the input port appears in identical form at the output port in the case of a positive second-generation current conveyor (referred to as CCII+ henceforth), or inverted in the case of a negative second-generation current conveyor (referred to as CCII- henceforth), the output port displaying an impedance different from that of the input port. The reference port displays an extremely high impedance and therefore makes up a voltage reference.
A variety of documents describe such conveyors. For example, documents U.S. Pat. No. 3,619,798, U.S. Pat. No. 3,582,689, and EP-A-0 383 397 describe such current conveyors.
All of the documents mentioned above propose significant improvements for such current conveyors, but they do not truly concerned with the range of applications of these conveyors.
Other documents such as the INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ELECTRONICS, volume 65, no, 6, December 1988, pages 1203-1208, and IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS, volume 39, no, 2, February 1992, concern electronic circuits which comprise current conveyors and whose purpose is to amplify currents.
Document U.S. Pat. No. 5,124,666 concerns a second-generation current conveyor suitable for a MOS integrated circuits technology intended to embody bandpass filters and other types of filters using second-order transfer functions without operational amplifiers.
The document "Electronics letters", volume 24, no. 9, of Apr. 28, 1988, pages 548-549, concerns a current conveyor whose gain can be controlled according to the polarization current.
Document EP-A-0 454 253 concerns a current amplifier comprising a current conveyor in which, amongst other things, the sources of polarization current can be variable.
Finally, the document "Electronics letters", volume 20, no. 17, of Oct. 16, 1984, pages 674-676, describes an electronic circuit including at least one current conveyor in which the ratio between the output signal and the input signal can be controlled by a polarization current.
Now, there is a need for the embodiment of simple electronic circuits which use one or more current conveyors making it possible to obtain a maximum integration of these circuits.